Life After Death; Problems of the Future Life and Its Nature

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: which is repeated in the work of psychic research, whether it have any more validity or not than savage ideas. Many primitive peoples extended their doctrine of the soul to plants or even inanimate objects, such as stones and domestic utensils. This is evidenced in the burial of such objects with their owners at death. It was assumed or believed that the dead carried on the same occupations as when living on the earth. They required the same implements and objects. It was not supposed, however, that it was the same physical object, but its soul that was taken by the dead. This opens up the nature of the after life and to that we turn. 2. The Nature of the Future Life One cannot read the stories of primitive peoples and of their habits without seeing that their conception of the next life is the same, essentially the same, as that of the present life, the only difference being in the perceptible nature of the one and the imperceptible nature of the other. The dead carried on the same occupations as they had in life, a view which is clearly represented again in the ideas of the Book of Revelation in the Bible. This is a description of a purely sensory life with all the habits of monarchical institutions portrayed in it. When we examine psychic phenomena we can well understand how such ideas took their rise. Apparitions, for instance, show the dress and manners of the person they represent, whether the apparition be of the living or of the dead. And thus, says Tylor, it is the habitual feature of the ghost stories of the civilized, as of the savage world, that the ghost comes dressed, and even dressed in well-known clothing worn in life. Hearing as well as sight testifies to the phantom objects;the clanking of ghostly chains and the rustling of ghostly dresses are desc...